Hey, Ubuntu users: If you haven’t heard yet, Canonical killed off any hopes of releasing Unity 8 with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next year. Instead, Ubuntu will release 18.04 with the GNOME desktop. While some die-hard Ubuntu fans may have a case of inconsolable angst, this is actually not as bad of a thing as it may seem.

A brief history of Ubuntu desktops

A long time ago (in internet time anyway), the Ubuntu OS shipped with the GNOME 2 desktop environment, which was beloved at the time. During that era, only a handful desktop environments were widely used. GNOME and KDE took the lion’s share of users, while the lighter-weight XFCE and LXDE desktops catered to users who wanted a speedier desktop and less pizzazz.